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Customer service surveys at car dealerships must be serious, serious business. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from Bob’s story about being bullied by the Ford dealership where he bought his Fiesta. They called him up to say that if he planned to rate his (unsatisfactory) service experience as anything but satisfactory, he would be hurting the dealership and practically stealing money out of employees’ pockets and yanking food out of their kids’ mouths. If he didn’t say nice things, the service manager insinuated, the dealership might decide not to service his car at all.

Bob writes:

After multiple attempts at fixing my new Ford Fiesta the dealership said their hands were tied because Ford considers my problems “normal”. The service tech and managers admit that they don’t feel the problems are normal but can’t do anything more because Ford won’t classify them as a problem.

Yesterday the dealership left me a message stating that I’d be receiving a survey and if they request that if you can’t mark it as satisfied with the service to contact them. I did exactly that and spoke with the dealership’s service manager and explained my concerns. He seemed to be understanding but stressed that a bad grade on the survey could affect the service tech’s and service advisor’s “paycheck and future employment”. When I explained that they didn’t really do anything wrong but I couldn’t classify myself as being satisfied he said that a bad survey could affect my ability to get service at his facility in the future and insinuated that I wouldn’t get good service in the future because they would know that I had given them bad marks. He also stated that he could refuse me service in the future. I feel like I’m being blackmailed.

No matter how hard Ford is coming down on them to get good customer service scores, this isn’t an acceptable tactic to reach the magical goal of 100%. At minimum, it sounds like it’s time to find a new dealership for service (assuming that warranty requirements mean that Bob has to go to a dealership to get his car fixed at all.)